There’s a very specific kind of chaos that happens when someone becomes one of the biggest new names in music while refusing to show you their actual face, and EsDeeKid has been living in that chaos for about two years now. If you haven’t clocked the balaclava, the scouse accent, or the fact that half of TikTok spent last December convinced he was secretly Timothée Chalamet, where have you been? Because right now, EsDeeKid is one of the most talked-about rappers to come out of the UK in years, and he’s done it without ever letting you see who he actually is.
Born and raised in Liverpool — he’s talked about growing up in a council house and being “raised in the Liverpool slums,” in his own words, EsDeeKid built his sound in that murky, atmospheric corner of rap where trap and cloud rap collide. Think blown-out 808s, eerie synth lines that sound like they’re being played through a broken speaker in an abandoned warehouse, and that thick, half-slurred scouse delivery that makes every bar sound like it’s being confessed rather than rapped. It shouldn’t work as well as it does. It absolutely works.
The turning point was “Phantom,” produced by his longtime collaborator Wraith9, which caught fire on TikTok in September 2025 and has since racked up well over 70 million streams on Spotify alone (some reports now put combined numbers past 300 million once you count every platform and remix). It landed at exactly the right moment, right as his debut mixtape Rebel dropped in June 2025 and started climbing charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Rebel debuted at #16 on the UK Albums Chart and eventually cracked the US Billboard 200 at #23, which is a genuinely wild achievement for a mixtape from an artist nobody can identify, let alone put a face to.
And then there’s the Chalamet thing. Because EsDeeKid performs entirely masked — balaclava on, identity locked down, MF DOOM-style — the internet did what the internet does and started building conspiracy boards. The resemblance in body language, the matching Alexander McQueen skull scarf, the general vibe of “mysterious young man who could plausibly be either”, it all combined into one of 2025’s funniest ongoing bits. Then, in December, EsDeeKid and Chalamet actually teased a remix of “4 Raws” together, appearing in the same promo material, and the whole internet lost its mind trying to work out whether that confirmed or destroyed the theory. Genuinely one of the more entertaining marketing moments in recent memory, whether or not it was ever meant to be one.
What’s kept people invested beyond the mystery, though, is that EsDeeKid is genuinely part of something bigger happening in UK rap right now. He sits alongside artists like fakemink and Jim Legxacy in what’s being called a real renaissance moment for British hip-hop — a scene that’s stopped trying to sound American and started leaning hard into its own accents, its own slang, its own bleak, beautiful production choices. EsDeeKid’s co-signs tell the same story: Yeat, Yung Lean, and Jack Harlow have all shown love, which tells you the appeal isn’t just a UK thing, it’s translating globally.
He’s also not just an internet phenomenon anymore. EsDeeKid played his first ever US show back in February at Avondale Music Hall in Chicago, dropping the single “Omens” — all thunderous production and boastful bars — on the same day. That was just the warm-up. Off the back of “Omens” plus follow-up singles “Made It On Our Own” and “RockWave,” he announced the ‘Council House Rat’ World Tour in late July: 48 dates across three legs, starting with 28 shows through North America in September and October, swinging through 15 European cities in November, then closing out with five UK and Ireland dates in December — including a headline slot at London’s OVO Arena Wembley and, best of all, two homecoming shows at Liverpool’s Blackstone Street Warehouse. Going from a sold-out Bowery Ballroom show in New York to Wembley Arena in under a year is not a small jump, and for an artist whose entire brand is built on anonymity, that’s a genuinely serious live draw.
Whether EsDeeKid ever takes the mask off is genuinely anyone’s guess, and honestly, it’s more interesting if he doesn’t. The mystery is baked into the project at this point, it’s not a gimmick tacked on top of the music, it’s part of what makes the music feel the way it does: hazy, private, a little bit dangerous. Rebel was the introduction; with a run of new singles and a 48-date world tour landing him at Wembley by December, 2026 is shaping up to be the year EsDeeKid stops being “that masked guy who might be Timothée Chalamet” and just becomes one of the biggest names in UK rap, full stop.
0 Comments